6 Common SEO Errors of eCommerce Websites

If you are an online merchant, you might think that your site can gain a good rank in the search engines by only listing as many products as possible. But it is far from the reality. What you need to be aware of is that ranking an eCommerce website in the search engines is more difficult than a blog or a 10-page website. Generally, eCommerce websites have numerous product pages continuously shuffling on and it takes a lot to manage all of them to have a better result. 

When it comes to the eCommerce SEO strategies, you are not only done by just handling the products inventory and adding new pages. You also need manage people who have their hands on the website. Generally, they don’t have much SEO knowledge and even little changes made by them leave a lot of impact on the rankings.

The write-up discusses 6 common SEO errors found on online stores. 

Low-Quality Product Descriptions 

If it is a matter of optimizing an eCommerce website, product descriptions play a very important role. You need to create unique descriptions for each item sold on your site. It definitely is a time-consuming task but it can certainly help your products rank. You may think that the image of the product will do everything but a quality product description is highly responsible for attracting the visitors. Apart from that, the search engines are unable to read the images. 

Having Manufacturer’s Product Description 

It would be a big mistake if you use the product description given by the manufacturer. You can also get banned from the search engines because of this. What you need to know is that these descriptions are distributed to many online stores and most website owners publish them without making any change. Consequently, it can give birth to the duplicate content issue. So, using your own product description is always recommended. 

Improper Optimization of Product Pages 

It is very common with the online store owners that they want to drive traffic to the product listing pages rather than product pages. It is a fact that general terms will definitely drive most of the traffic but you also need to keep in mind that there are buyers who know their requirement and type the specific product name they want. Therefore, it is necessary for an online store to have properly optimized product pages with product reviews, exact keywords, ALT tag images, etc. 

Product reviews play a key role here. They are not only necessary for optimizing your page but also they help the visitors make a buying decision. All you need to ensure that the reviews are SEO friendly and can be indexed easily. You also need to target specific keywords your visitorsare looking for. The inclusion of the brand name, model number, color and size in the product page is also beneficial. 

Errors While Building Internal Links 

As eCommerce sites are handled by a lot of people(designers, managers, copywriters) there are instances when they have improper internal linking. These links can give mixed signals to the search engines and the ranking can get affected. On the basis of your website, default URLs are generated for all product pages. These URLs are often structurally very poor containing a lot of unnecessary characters and numbers. They may not be keyword friendly and may use anonymous Ids and URL strings.

Therefore, you need to build short and easy to read URLs that are relevant to the products enlisted on the pages. It is always beneficial to use lower case letters in your URLs. The use of dashes instead of spaces or underscores in the URL also has apositive impact on SEO.

Not Having Speaking URLs 

Speaking URLs are also called SEO friendly URLs that include keywords and explain what the page is all about. Have a look at the URL “https://www.gwebpro.com/5-link-building-tactics-to-avoid-in-2019/”. It contains the name of the title of the blog and discloses the entire matter. When it comes to online store SEO, it is very important to build all the URLs for your products in this way. It makes the researcher aware of what he is going to have when is clicking the URL. You also need to insert relevant keywords in it. 

Not Having Sitemaps and Robots.txt. 

To help search engines crawl your website you need to have automated sitemaps that constantly update themselves with the product updates and theaddition of products. It is necessary for aproper index of your products, categories and contents. It also ensures that the crawling is done in the most appropriate path. Replacing and adding products constantly put a lot of strain on the crawlers. But with a constantly adapting sitemap.XML, the search engines can have aclear crawling path. 

These are some common SEO issues that hinder most eCommerce sites from getting good ranks. Check your website today and solve if it has these above-mentioned issues and gain more traffic.